


something ugly

by Prim_the_Amazing



Series: RVB Angst War [2]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Eye Trauma, Illustrated, Knives, M/M, Restraints, Torture, Warning: Felix, carolina ex machina, god i had fun with this, prims first torture fic, the grimmons is more implied tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 04:10:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13990191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing
Summary: “Felix,” Locus says again.“What!?” tears out of his throat like a frustrated bird bursting out of the leaves of a tree. Doesn’t he get how serious this is?Locus points at the ground, straight into the dispersing smoke. Felix squints into it.Glints of orange, of maroon.“We have a lead.”All of them hadn’t escaped.-Felix tortures Grif and Simmons.





	something ugly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hylian_reptile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hylian_reptile/gifts).



> Prompt: Felix captures some reds (your choice) and needs to know where the rest of the reds and blues are hiding so he can wipe them out before they tell the news/feds that the civil war is fake. Obviously, he’s going to drag it out of one of them by torturing the other(s). 
> 
> This is for RVB angst war! Oh, also, CC_Writes helped with cheerleading and advice. Thanks, dude!

Felix… indulges. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone indulges from time to time. And he deserves to more than anyone, trapped on this shitty mission that’s dragged on for far longer than it should’ve, that’s starting to get less fun by the day, surrounded by absolute morons, so deep undercover that he can only be himself around Hargrove on comms or occasionally  _ Locus.  _

Or a pack of absolute morons who are about to be dead by his hand anyways, so why not vent a little? Why not brag? Why not take a breath and just be _ himself _ for once, around people  _ without  _ such a stick up their asses that they’re completely unimpressed? Clearly, this is all Locus’ fault for not indulging  _ him  _ more often, so he has to go and get his kicks elsewhere. For not pulling the trigger a fraction of a second sooner, for not hitting the Reds and Blues with that rocket before that Carolina bitch had pulled the pin on the teleportation grenade or whatever the fuck they’re called and they disappeared. 

Speaking of which, it’s her fault too. Lurking in their midst with her camouflage armor, acting like one of them, waiting until every single secret had spilled from Felix’s lips before she revealed herself. He’s glad he got a good stab at her. Should’ve gotten her in the throat. The next time he sees her, he’ll gut her like a fish. 

The next time he sees all of them, and it has to be soon, he’s gonna kill them. Not just because he wants to, but because they  _ know _ now. He has to stop them before they talk and ruin  _ years _ of hard work--

“Felix,” Locus says, the smoke from his last rocket still swirling heavily in the air. 

“Don’t,” Felix grits out from between his teeth. He is _ not _ in the mood for a lecture from Locus right now (or ever, really, but especially now). More importantly, he doesn’t have the time. They could be anywhere on Chorus right now, who knows where Agent Carolina could have built a safehouse. Shit, she might have even just teleported them straight into New Republic territory, he has to start looking immediately--

“Felix,” Locus says again. 

_ “What!?” _ tears out of his throat like a frustrated bird bursting out of the leaves of a tree. Doesn’t he get how serious this is? 

Locus points at the ground, straight into the dispersing smoke. Felix squints into it. 

Glints of orange, of maroon. 

“We have a lead.” 

All of them hadn’t escaped.

* * *

 

Locus disappears to track down the rest of the Reds and Blues the old fashioned way: by of systematic searching by hundreds of mercenaries at his beck and call with heat vision goggles and helicopters, and tracking. Felix happily lets him cover that part of the mission. See, this is why they make such good partners: Felix is the people person, and Locus likes the boring stuff. They complete each other, creating a perfect killer, good enough to murder an entire planet. 

Locus has never been good at torture anyways. At the start, he seemed to have some sort of moral objection to it. After a little while the war grinded that part of him away nicely, but he still wasn’t any good at it. Not enough creativity. Not enough  _ heart.  _ Everyone knows that to be really good at something, you have to enjoy it to some degree. 

Felix enjoys it to the point of indulgence. He is, in turn,  _ very _ good at it. 

The ones left behind are Captains Grif and Simmons, two of the four Felix had gotten to know. Not as well as he’d gotten to know Tucker, though. He’d thought that out of all of them, Tucker had the best shot of becoming even mildly problematic. But apparently that had been a mistake, because here he is, stuck with two people he desperately needs to get information out of, and the sum of what he knows of them is this: the maroon one is the nervous one and the orange one is the lazy one. Great. Fantastic. He sure took advantage of his cover to the fullest while he still had it. 

Eh, whatever. He’s broken people with much less, and you get to know the real  _ fundamentals _ of a person real fast when a knife’s involved. Was he a screamer, was he a crier, was he shouter, would he pass out, would he beg, would he stubbornly grit his teeth and try and be silent, etc… He’d figure all of that stuff out, soon. 

For now, he’s trying to wait for them to wake up. Something had knocked them unconscious during the fight. Probably being caught at the tail edge of the rocket blast in a bad way. If they’d stood just a bit closer, ironically, they wouldn’t have been hit at all, but rather been saved by the teleportation grenade. Felix likes irony. 

It had given him the opportunity to drag them somewhere secure without much struggling or fuss, anyways. Somewhere indoors, where he could handcuff them just out of reach of each other, their guns spirited somewhere far away. 

He fingers his knife as he watches their still forms. Tosses it. Does a few tricks. Imagines sinking it into the orange one’s guts. Grif’s. 

He’s  _ trying _ to be patient. He’s not doing great. There’s just  _ so much _ on this planet trying it. The lukewarm ‘hot water’ during showers. The ‘nothing but rations’ food. The mosquitos. The idiots who think he’s their friend, which was a little bit funny at the start but is slowly becoming more and more grating. Locus. Not  _ enough _ Locus. That’s one of the most frustrating things about him, how he makes him want to roll his eyes or snarl whenever they’re together, but how he makes him feel antsy and like his skin’s too hot and tight in a bad way when he’s not--

Felix realizes that he’s thinking about Locus for no good reason again, and with that his patience snaps. He’s got perfectly good captives right here, and they aren’t holding his attention. Time to stop that right now, awake or not. 

He takes two quick, long strides towards the maroon one on a whim. They’d been supposed to wake up to see him just standing there in front of them. He was going to recite a speech at them which he’d half drafted in his head by now, something about how he’s going to  _ enjoy _ this, about how he was going to take his time. That’s half a life, really. He can’t afford to linger as much as he might want to. Time is of the essence. 

The fun is really starting to drain out of this mission. He can’t wait for the grand finish; it’ll bring some spring back into his step. 

He crouches down and taps the point of his knife into Simmons’ visor plate, like he’s a kid knocking on an aquarium to get the fish’s attention.  _ Stop that, you’ll spook them!  _ So?

No reaction. Boo. 

He takes the man’s helmet off. He’d kind of been wanting to save this for when they were conscious. There’s just something about the way they try to jerk away, the way their breath hitches and shudders. They know what’s coming, when he starts taking their armor off. 

He hasn’t seen the sim troopers without their armor on much. People on Chorus have grown a bit of an aversion to taking it off, which he and Locus had carefully fostered with surprise attacks and assassination. Nothing fosters resentment quite like feeling you never get to escape the war. The sim troopers, however, take it to a whole ‘nother level. He can’t recall ever seeing Tucker’s face outside of meal or shower time, and Caboose had thoughtlessly tried to skip taking his armor off for both of those things multiple times. He saw Grif’s face a little more often due to his snacking, and he had some pretty distinctive skin grafts that he kind of idly wants to play with. 

Simmons, though. It occurs to him now that he’s never seen Simmons’ face before. Maybe it’s because of coincidence, maybe it’s because of shyness. He doesn’t know because it had never really occurred to him to try and see it in the first place. He’d just assumed that it’d be boring and mousy like the rest of him, pathetic. Zero curiosity or interest. 

He feels all of that abruptly change as the helmet comes off. He has short red hair and freckles, which has never been his type, but oh, the _ metal.  _ Half of his face has been overtaken by it, from forehead to jaw and-- oh, oh, the metal continues past the high neck of his kevlar suit. He crooks a finger into the neck of his suit and pulls it down a little. The metal doesn’t stop. How far does it go? 

“You’re a little more interesting than you seem, huh?” he chuckles and gives him a couple pats on his cheek, dropping the helmet to the floor. No reaction. A flash of annoyance overtakes the surprised appreciation for a moment. 

He puts the edge of his knife right at the seam between flesh and metal. It’s like connect the dots, like coloring inside the lines. It’s like he’s  _ supposed _ to put his knife there. 

“Wake up,” he whispers, and the knife sinks in. 

His knives are kept sharp. It sinks through the flesh like butter, and scrapes against the metal like its already rasping against bone. Simmons’ eyes open wide in time with a silent gasp, with a full body jerk that takes his face away from the knife. Blood drips from his knife, from Simmons’ face. The back of his head smacks against the wall, and his wide eyes squeeze shut just as quickly as they’d opened. 

One of his eyes had been red, inorganic. So.  _ Interesting.  _ If Felix pries it out with his knife, are wires going to trail out after it? Only one way to find out. 

“About time,” he says, like Simmons is late for a sparring match and Felix is mildly annoyed. 

His eyes blink back open, dazed. Blood drips from his chin onto his chest plate. There’d be a starker contrast if it was teal colored. 

He frowns, annoyed, and slaps him to get him to get it together more quickly. 

“Felix?” he asks, still uncomprehending. Did he get a concussion or something? God, that’d be boring. 

“Me.” 

“What are you--” And then, very visibly, everything comes rushing back to him. So, absolutely zero of a poker face on this guy. That’s just fine with Felix. 

He looks at Felix with wide eyed fear, the whites of his eyes (eye) so very visible. His hands jerk against his chains, and his breath hitches, wheezes, as his movement’s pulled short. His eyes dart desperately around the cell, as if he’ll find anything useful. 

His gaze lands on Grif, and it’s like he can’t pull his eyes away from his slumped figure. His throat works and clicks dryly, compulsively swallowing. 

“G… Grif…” he whispers, clearly trying to raise his voice and failing. 

Felix bursts out into laughter, which makes Simmons look back at him, startled and afraid. 

“Jesus!” he howls. “I haven’t even  _ started _ yet and you’re near tears! Ahh, you guys are something else.” He almost mimes wiping a tear of laughter away. 

Simmons stares at him for a moment, and then his attention snaps back to Grif. “Grif!” he cries out, louder now. “Grif, wake the fuck up!” 

His voice sounds strangled, hysterical. That could get annoying fast, but Felix only needs for one of them to be able to talk anyways. 

“Grif--” he says, and is cut off by his own voice breaking, shoulders heaving. He really is near tears. 

“Relax,” he reassures, like Simmons is fretting over something silly. “I haven’t killed him. Yet.” 

He untenses for a moment, but then tenses right back up again at the ‘yet’.  _ Too _ easy. 

But, he reminds himself, this isn’t supposed to be a fun challenge for him. This is an actually urgent task. He has to keep in mind not to forget that, to get caught up in the heat of the moment with no Locus around to be a killjoy. 

He can indulge a  _ little _ though, right? 

“You should shout louder,” he suggests. “Or else I’ll have to wake him up on my own.” He waves the bloody knife in his face for emphasis. 

Simmons flinches back, eyes glued to the knife. His face twitches, and then he licks his lip, catching some of the blood running down his face. The taste registers, the pain catches up with him. Felix briefly contemplates licking some of that blood up himself, but nah. Simmons really isn’t his type, interesting cyborg parts or no. He likes them big and tall, dangerous and snarling. Not some handcuffed, bleeding, teary eyed weakling. Tall’s all Simmons has going for him, and he’s propped up against the wall in a sitting position anyways. 

Simmons turns back to Grif. “GRIF!” he hollers at the top of his voice.  _ “WAKE UP YOU FAT FUCK!”  _

Well, that sure was an eager response to a pretty mild threat. Felix’s eyes dart between the two, intrigued, an idea forming. 

Grif stirs, faintly. “Five more minutes,” he groans. 

Felix springs up from his crouch to his feet, and walks swiftly over to Grif. He feels a smile start to take over his face. He’s coming up with plans. This is starting to, moment by moment, to feel less like a chore and more like something that could be fun.  _ Very _ fun. 

Stress relief. He needs that. 

“Five more minutes!?” Simmons repeats incredulously, the pitch of his voice steadily rising. “Grif, you dumbass, we’re _ captives--” _

Felix reaches him then, and kicks him as harshly as he can in the gut. The breath whooshes out of him, and Felix thinks he can hear Simmons bite his tongue from the other end of the room. 

“Morning, sunshine,” he says, and crouches down and grasps the chin of Grif’s helmet. Pushes and pulls at it until the man can get a good long look at him, from his best angle. “I’ve got some questions for you.” 

“Shit,” Grif says flatly, which summarizes his current situation quite nicely. 

“So, where’s the rest of your gang of chucklefucks hiding?” he asks, like the answer isn’t all that terribly important to him. It isn’t, really. Not only would it be disappointing if he caved so quickly, so easily, but also he wouldn’t trust the answer. The Reds and Blues are wannabe heroes. Ergo, they like to think of themselves as good people. And ‘good people’ don’t sell out their own without at least a little encouragement first. 

Heroes aren’t very smart. They could save themselves a lot of pain, but do they ever? No. 

“I don’t fucking know,” he says, which is a weak and uninspiring response. 

“God, I hope you don’t remain that boring and predictive the whole time you’re here,” he says sincerely. Shoves his knife into his chest plate like a finger during an argument. It doesn’t penetrate, but Felix sees his hands curl into fists. “You should hope so too. I’m kind of liking your friend better, so far.” 

“Is-- is being your favorite a good thing or a bad thing?” Simmons asks, sounding like he doesn’t know which one he wants for it to be. 

Felix smirks, and takes off Grif’s helmet. His brown skin looks ashen, his pale skin even paler than before. His mismatched eyes flit from the bloody knife pressed up against his chest plate, making blood trickle down his orange chest plate like raindrops on a window, leaving behind a red trail, and back over to Simmons. Bloody faced, pale faced, wide eyed Simmons. 

“No,” Felix says, because he knows for a fact now that it’s the most advantageous thing for him to say, and because it’s the truth. “It isn’t.” 

The skin around Grif’s eyes and mouth tighten minutely like he wants to flinch and grimace at the answer. Yes, he’s definitely made the right choice here. 

They’re  _ partners.  _

Not like him and Locus. They’re too weak for that. If Locus and Felix were in this situation (as if that could ever happen) then Felix wouldn’t worry when Locus was hurt. Locus wouldn’t care when Felix was hurt. Because they can trust each other, because they each know that the other is strong, is a survivor. These two are too weak for that kind of trust, and they know it. They know that the other could die, and they’re terrified of it. They’re _ protective.  _

“Do you want to change your answer, Grif?” he asks. “Where are the Reds and Blues.” 

“Look, man, I  _ seriously don’t know where they are--” _

“That’s too bad,” he says, and lunges with his knife at his face. He stops it half an inch from his eye, and bares his teeth in a smile at Simmons’ horrified exclamation, at the way Grif sharply inhales and stills, staring carefully at the knife so close puncturing his eyeball. 

And then he stands up and walks away without laying so much as a scratch on him. 

“H--hey,” Grif says.

Walks towards Simmons instead. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Grif asks, voice high and a little shaky. 

Felix isn’t going to give him a single injury to distract himself with, to reassure himself.  _ At least I got hurt too. I didn’t get off easy. There’s no reason to hate myself.  _ Nope. Not today. 

“This is on you,” Felix says to him, and descends on Simmons. 

A statement like that requires immediate action. Something dramatic, something painful, something  _ visual. _ He barely gives himself time to think, and instead just follows his instincts. Felix likes his instincts. They’re honed, sharp, quick. Just like him. 

His knife plunges into the gap between glowing, red inorganic eyeball and an artificial eyelid made out of some material he isn’t interested enough in puzzling out. His other hands whips out to slam Simmons’ head back against the wall again, holding tightly by his jaw and the side of his face to keep him still as he works. It’s the flesh side of his face, so his nails dig in, make more blood well up. It’s going to bruise nicely, later, if he lets him live long enough. 

Simmons screams, raw throated and shocked and pained. Functioning pain receptors, then. He’d really, really hoped so. 

He works his knife there in that gap, shoving it deeper while making sure not to go so deep that he ends this too soon. Wiggles it around. Prying stuff loose. 

_ “Stop!” _ Grif cries out, and Felix actually does. His knife stills exactly where it is, and Simmons, gasping and making breathless noises of pain, desperately tries to move in a way that’ll make it hurt less. Felix doesn’t let him, his restraining hand firm on his face, holding him still. 

Felix just barely moves his head enough to look in Grif’s direction, to take in the expression on his face. Horrified. 

The sim troopers are proving to have a seriously low tolerance. He bets that for Resistance to Interrogation training their delusional sargeant sang one hundred bottles of beer at them for one afternoon and then promptly forgot about it forever in favor of lighting firecrackers still held in his hand and saving puppies. 

“You’re ready to give me an answer?” he asks, carefully not moving. Carefully not withdrawing an inch. The threat is clear. 

“I, I-- what do you want for me to _ say? _ ” he demands. “I don’t know where they are! I don’t know where anything fucking is around here! There’s the crash site and the Feds base and the News base and that’s _ it,  _ I don’t know anything more! I don’t know shit!!!” 

“You’re almost stupid enough for me to believe that,” he says, and draws his knife out of Simmons. Sharply. At an angle. 

The eye rips satisfyingly out along with it, like the roots of a small tree clinging to the earth, stubborn but ultimately helpless. He was right. Wires do trail along after it. He grabs the eyeball and tugs until they break and snap and hang out of the new dark socket of Simmons’ face. 

He let’s go of Simmons, and he immediately curls up, hiding his face (his remaining eye, his new socket) against his knees, the shaking chains making his tremors so easily apparent, his hands opening and closing, opening and closing. 

The eyeball starts to dim in his hand, but it still feels satisfyingly warm in his palm, like a slowly cooling light bulb. 

“Good job on not blowing my eardrums,” he praises, because Simmons isn’t screaming now. He isn’t making a sound. He even seems to forget to breathe, sometimes. 

He looks over to Grif. His face looks… dead. Is he dissociating? Is he already going numb, catatonic, distancing himself? That won’t do. He has to--

Felix hears a sound like teeth grinding, chattering. Notices how bright Grif’s eyes are. No, he’s still paying keen attention. He just doesn’t know what to do with his face. 

“Grif?” he prompts cheerfully. He’s making an impact. Felix likes making an impact. “Buddy, you still with me? Any ideas for what I should do next, or are you going to tell me where your safehouse is?” 

“I,” Grif says, and then has to stop and clear his throat when it comes out as a weak rasp. “I don’t--” 

Felix raises his knife threateningly, and Grif bites his tongue and shuts up. If only everyone were so easy to train. If only everyone had such obvious and easily pulled levers as Simmons clearly is. 

“You sit there and wrack your memory,” he says, “and I’ll just come up with a few ideas of my own.” 

He turns his focus back onto Simmons, who has now progressed from not breathing to breathing very carefully. In, and out. In, and out. Measured, large breaths, repeated and deliberate. Like Locus when Felix is prying a bullet that he can’t reach on his own out of him. He never so much as grunts, but the way he breathes changes. Even when he deliberately jabs around a little, it doesn’t so much a stutter. It’s a little frustrating. A little nostalgic. Felix hasn’t pried a bullet out from Locus for years because of this fake civil war. 

The nostalgia pisses him off, and the anger makes him move. He reaches out and gets a hand underneath Simmons’ chin, yanks his head up where he can see him. About six wires hang out of his socket, the longest one reaching his chin. He looks paler than ever, and the blood from the cut on his face is starting to clot. His expression reminds him of an animal driven mindless with fear, paralyzed. And of course, he’s crying. Silently, not sobbing, tears stream down from his remaining eye. 

Felix angles his head for him, making him break terrified eye contact with Felix and look at Grif instead. He wants for him to see. He needs time to think. 

What, he thinks, would he not want for him to do, if he was in their position? If he was watching someone cut into Locus. Of course, as he’d been over earlier, he wouldn’t give a shit. There’s never any reason to worry  _ for _ Locus. He’s been held down and cut into before, and he turned out fine. Better than before, even. 

But what could someone do to Felix’s partner to make him  _ angry? _ (Make him turn against him. No, that’s never going to happen. If it could have it would have by now.) Make him useless. 

His eyes travel up and down Simmons’ body as he considers this. That sounds like a challenge, to be honest, and not in the good way. Simmons is already goddamn near useless. Look at him, just sitting around being a weeping burden. Felix is supposed to somehow find a new rock bottom for him? 

Well, he’s pulled off the impossible before. 

He whistles sharply at the man, like calling a dog to heel. Simmons’ eyes snap over to him from where he’d been making tragic goo goo eyes at Grif or whatever, he doesn’t give a shit. 

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, because while action is fun, and being witnessed doing that action is fun, talking is a lot of fun too, especially with a literally captive audience. This torture session hasn’t had a  _ single _ monologue yet. Simmons shivers, and Felix laughs underneath his breath and wipes away some of his tears just to watch him cringe away from his touch. “I’ve been _ thinking,” _ he goes on, “about how to break you. Can’t be too hard. Maybe too easy, even. Like accidentally finishing something you’d been meaning to draw out. I want to do this _ right. _ What do you think is the right way, Simmons?” 

“Fuck off,” he breathes to the man who’s got him chained up in a nondescript room while holding a knife to him, like the moron he is. 

“There’s a few different ways I could go about it, but not that many. I don’t have a whole lot of tools ready for you here. This has been improvised. But I can be creative.” He lightly traces his knife along the side of his face, watches his jaw clench tightly. “I could take your other eye. Stick my knife into your ears. Cut off your mouthy tongue. You think your partner will stick with you then? Even when you’re like that?” 

From the way his lips thin, Simmons doubts it. 

“What if I cut off all of your limbs? It’d be a messy job with just a knife and no saw, but I’ve done it before. Will your partner stick with you then?” 

“He’s not-- my partner,” he says after a moment, as if that’s the sole objection he has to what Felix just said. 

“Oh, please.” He rolls his eyes. “Don’t lie to me. I can  _ see _ it. Partners, whether you love them or hate them, have your back. Too bad you’re both so inept.” 

He looks over to Grif at that, to give him a pointed look. 

It’s clear that his words have had more of an effect on Grif than Simmons. This was the right strategy. Sometimes, emotions can be a more effective motivator than pain. 

“Do you remember where they are now, Grif?” he asks pleasantly, knife still held to Simmons’ face. “Because I think I’m done brainstorming.” 

“List--listen,” he says, and he sounds breathless. He could stand to learn some breathing exercises, like Simmons and Locus. “I don’t-- I  _ can’t--” _ he cuts himself off helplessly as Felix continues to stare at him flatly, not moving a muscle as his knife rests against Simmons’ face, as Simmons’ breathing goes shallow and quick and then slow and deliberate as he realizes that he has to brace himself for pain again. If he could keep them for long enough, Felix bets he could make the man flinch on reflex every time Grif so much as opens his mouth. 

“Full sentences, Grif,” he prompts him. He won’t bother urging him on again, if he stutters into silence yet another time. He’ll just start in on the fun. 

“There’s nothing I can  _ do,” _ he says, and his voice breaks and his face crumples. “There’s nothing I can say that’ll make you stop--”

And with that he’s crying too. Teeth clenched like he’s in physical agony, his chest heaves and his shoulders shake as he tries to hold back his sobs. 

Felix basks in the feeling that washes through him at that, like dwelling in an afterglow. He hasn’t even touched Grif, and this is what he’s been reduced to. He’s amazing. 

Simmons lunges for his throat with his teeth and a furiously desperate snarl. Felix’s eyes are on Grif, and he’s sitting so close to Simmons he’s almost in his lap. Simmons makes it, his head held at an angle, his teeth clamping down on the middle of Felix’s throat around where his Adam’s apple is with furious force. 

There’s a fraction of a second where all thought is obliterated from his mind by the pain and the shock, but Felix’s body has been thoroughly trained to react without thought when something like this happens. He’s lost count of how many times he’s killed someone faster than he’s had time to realize that he’s being attacked in the first place. His free hand comes up and punches Simmons hard in the side of the head, armored fist clenched, and Simmons makes a pained, muffled sound. Refuses to let go, like a stubborn dog. 

It doesn’t matter. Felix’s wits are returning to him now, enough that he realizes that Grif is shouting but not enough to know what he’s shouting, and he just reaches out and digs his thumb painfully into the joint of Simmons’ jaw until his own reflexes force him to let go of Felix’s throat. 

After that, there’s nothing stopping him from forcefully shoving the bastard away from him, the back of his head smacking hard against the wall with a dull thud, safely out of biting range. 

Felix assesses the damage with automatic coolness, drilled into him by long years as first a soldier and then a mercenary. The anger will come in just a bit. 

Simmons hadn’t been able to breach skin. Felix had been wearing his kevlar suit, after all. But his throat is bruised to fuck, it hurts to breathe, and it’ll probably sting like an absolute bitch to talk (and Felix  _ loves _ talking). 

As for the damage done to Simmons, when he had lunged the knife that Felix had been holding against his face had left behind a long bleeding gash. He sees blood trickle from where he punched him in the side of the head, and he wouldn’t be surprised to see him bleeding from the back of his head either. He has an unfocused, stunned look to his gaze. Probably concussed. It’s no more than he deserves.  

Worst of all, however, is the fact that this pathetic fucker actually managed to hurt him, even a little bit. 

And there’s the anger. He can feel it boiling up, making him feel downright  _ heady _ with it. 

He dimly, distantly starts parsing what Grif’s shouting at him. 

“--I know, I know, I was  _ lying, _ okay!? I know where they are! Please let him go I’ll tell you--”

This is an extremely time sensitive and crucial mission. He has to finish this as soon as possible. He has to stay focused. Has to stay on task. 

(He deserves this.) 

He ignores Grif. 

“You’re going to pay for that,” he tells Simmons, who seems to be still too dazed to even register what’s being said to him, what’s happening. Doesn’t matter. Knives speak louder than words. He’ll make sure he’s understood. That the message sinks in. That he has an impact. 

The words make his throat burn. He grits his teeth in a smile. 

Felix… indulges.

* * *

 

Carolina shouted out a warning, held up the teleport grenade, and waited until the last possible second to activate it. She waited as long as she could. She did her best. 

It fucking  _ hurts _ to fail when she tries so hard. 

“You saved most of them,” Church says, and it’s one of his weaker attempts at consolation because he can’t even begin to hide how worried he is about the two she left behind. 

She left two of them behind. Two sim troopers, with mercenaries. With _ Felix and Locus. _ She might as well have tossed a couple of particularly idiotic kittens to frenzied sharks. 

“Can I go back for them  _ now?” _ she impatiently asks Grey. 

The woman had insisted that she not immediately jump back into a fight in the wounded state she was in. When Carolina had bristled and prepared to bulldoze her way past the doctor’s arguments, Wash had reluctantly chimed in in her favor. She’d just be going right back to the situation she’d just barely escaped out of, except this time even more hideously outnumbered. 

Sarge had declared war on him on the spot, and an already upset Donut and Lopez had had to hold him back. 

Church had thrown in his vote with Grey and Wash, and Carolina had looked around her and realized that she was on Tucker and Sarge’s side. The people with actual common sense versus the headstrong idealistic morons. 

She’d told them that she was going to find them within the day no matter what, but she’d let Grey do some work on her first. 

Abandoning Grif and Simmons to the mercenaries makes her feel sick to her stomach. She isn’t close to them, and the majority of the time she’s spent with them hadn’t exactly been on the best of terms, but she’s seen enough of them that they’ve been humanized to an unfortunate degree in her mind. Nervous high strung Simmons forced to be around intimidating Locus, laid back Grif trapped with sadistic Felix. It leaves a bad taste in her mouth. Her mind plays out horrifying scenarios for her during every second of her enforced rest, all of them horribly plausible at the moment. 

“Honestly, you shouldn’t be fighting  _ any _ time soon,” she says. “But the bleeding has stopped and I’ve made the necessary stitches. Please don’t pop your stitches! You’ll in all likelihood bleed out and die. Also, don’t use your speed mod, okay? It’ll raise hell on your leg.” She says all of this quite cheerfully. As a deeply undercover agent in Locus’ personal favorite little gang of space pirates, she hasn’t really had the opportunity or inclination to get to know the woman. She’s an enigma and a half. 

“So that’s a yes?” she asks, standing up cautiously. It hurts, but she’s fought enduring worse. 

There’s now a slight edge of bloodlust to the cheery mania in her voice. “Give them hell, sweetie.” 

So far, annoying pet names aside, Grey doesn’t seem all that bad. 

Carolina smiles behind her helmet as she reaches for the teleportation grenade and finally lets herself act on that insistent itch to  _ do something, _ to act, to fix her mistake. 

“I will.” 

She doesn’t even sway as the grenade brings her to the last place it had warped from, where she had failed to save everyone, too used to the sensation by now. It’s been locked on these two coordinates now, useless for reaching and alerting the citizens of Chorus of what’s really going, but vital to this far more personal mission, to Church and the Reds and Blues. To Grif and Simmons. 

She takes in the now empty landscape coolly. Waiting had admittedly gotten rid of the threat of immediately being shot down at her reappearance, but she’s going to have to actually _ fin _ d Grif and Simmons now. 

“There,” Church says, and he zooms her HUD in on an impossibly small disturbance in the flat, packed earth. “Drag marks, human sized.” 

She’s witnessed the dangers of having an AI in your head firsthand, but god, the _ benefits. _ How could she resist that? 

She follows the marks, walking swiftly while resisting the urge to sprint. Her leg. She has to look out for her leg. Stay fresh for the fight. 

She knows in her bones that there’s going to be a fight, and she’s got no choice but to win it. 

She enters the now hauntingly empty Fed base. Tries not to ignore the ashes she steps around as she quietly makes her way through the building. Can’t help but speed up at the sounds she hears as she gets closer to her goal. 

Grif, she thinks. That’s Grif screaming, that’s Grif that she can faintly hear through the walls, growing louder the longer she walks. He’s shouting words, still too muffled for her to parse. 

“Can you tell what he’s saying?” she whispers to Church. His senses are often better than most humans. 

“... Just be ready to walk in on something ugly,” he eventually says, as if she hasn’t been bracing herself for whatever she’s going to see for hours now. 

She frowns, but takes his silent advice. Knowing will just piss her off, horrify her, distract her. Unimportant information. 

He sounds so… raw. 

She speeds up again, as much as she can without being loud. 

It doesn’t occur to her to wonder why she hasn’t heard Simmons before she’s opening a door as silently as possible and walking in on… the source of the shouting. Everyone in the room is too focused on the spectacle to even notice her entrance, giving her the opportunity to truly let the scene before her sink in. 

Simmons is being disassembled. That’s the best way she can put it. His inorganic eye is lying shattered and abandoned on the floor, like a dropped Christmas ornament. His cyborg arm has been taken off, but it seems like Felix couldn’t figure out how to make it come off, or didn’t bother to try, or just found the idea of doing it properly boring, because there’s a  _ decent  _ chunk of flesh still attached to the prosthetic, his stump cutting off much farther up his arm now. Felix is in the middle of repeating the same process with his cyborg leg, the armor plates on his leg strewn about on the floor, his knife sawing through kevlar and flesh, blood pooling beneath them. 

Grif is begging for Felix to stop. 

Simmons is unconscious. 

Felix is cheerfully humming. 

Carolina is already across the room, going for his neck with every inch of power her honed muscles and hightech armor can afford her, aiming to snap it in one blow. 

Her leg buckles and her hit goes wide. Felix cries out in pain and surprise, and then twists with the blow to attack her and he isn’t dead, she didn’t kill him. She’s angry.  _ She’s so angry.  _

He stabs at her, his knife and his hand and his arm coated in Simmons’ blood, dripping with it, and he’s so _ low.  _ Torturing these people who couldn’t fight their way out of a half competent paper bag on their own, these stupid people, these stupid well meaning people that seem to be forgiving her and warming up to her and that helped her despite everything. 

She lets him drive his knife between the plates of her armor and into her so she can get the opportunity to punch him so hard his visor cracks, so hard that his chin snaps up with the momentum of it. The punch feels amazing. The stabbing leaves her feeling breathless. 

“Carolina,” Church says softly in her head, scared. 

She punches Felix again. In the throat, the sternum, the head again, anywhere the armor covering isn’t too heavy, anywhere with a gap large enough, anywhere that will hurt. She doesn’t stop. Beatdowns are about momentum, when it’s against someone strong. It’s about not stopping, not giving them a second to recuperate and fight back. It’s about being merciless. 

She’s very good at that. 

_ “Carolina!”  _ someone cries out, and it isn’t a voice in her head, it isn’t Church. It’s Grif. His voice is high, urgent. 

She punches Felix and looks at Grif out of the corner of her eye, just barely managing to give him an iota of her attention. 

“He’s bleeding out!” Grif snaps, panicked. “You have to get him out of here,  _ now!”  _

She looks at Simmons. He’s so pale. Small cuts litter his face. 

“He’s right, C,” Church says. 

Carolina can take advice. She can. She’s better now. 

She reaches out towards the chain of his handcuffs, and then reaches out to Church. He gives her the strength to snap the chain with her hands, and she tosses him over her shoulder with no help needed. She stands up, picks up the arm, the leg, leaves the eye as a lost cause. Almost falls on top of Grif, dropping Simmons and the limbs on him. She doesn’t have the time to snap Grif’s cuffs too. She doesn’t have to. 

Felix’s knife is still lodged in her shoulder, making her nerves scream whenever she makes the metal grind against things that shouldn’t be grinded against as she forces herself to move. 

“Bitch,” Felix grits out. 

She looks at him. He has his gun trained on them. 

“You talk too much,” she informs him, and activates the teleportation grenade before he has the time to squeeze the trigger. This time, Grif and Simmons are as close to her as it’s possible for them to be. 

She saves them.

* * *

 

Grif has never been so exhausted in his life, and nothing even happened to him. Knocked to the ground and unconscious by a missile blast that didn’t so much as singe anything but his armor. Given a single decent kick to the gut. His wrists are a little sore from the cuffs. That’s about it. 

Grey and Sarge had to work on Simmons for almost twelve hours without pause, sending everyone out to hunt for machines to cannibalize to adjust his prosthetics to their new lengths. Carolina begged off being given proper medical care on account of her healing unit, Wash’s helping hand, and her, Wash’s, and Church’s combined knowledge of first aid. 

Grif is banned from the scrap hunt even though he isn’t hurt. Grey says he’s in shock. That’s dumb. It’s not like he’s hurt or anything. 

At least he can donate blood. He and Simmons are compatible. In everything. Organs, bone marrow, blood, they’re a perfect match. 

That’s probably why he feels so woozy and distant, like he’s dreaming. Blood loss. He’s given too much. 

Well, that’s fine. 

Some dozen feet off, Grey and Sarge sleep on the ground, smeared in blood and oil, utterly exhausted. Grey is half lying in an equally unconscious Carolina’s lap, having insisted on seeing to her wounds the second they got Simmons stabilized. He thinks he can faintly hear Tucker and Wash argue about what they’re going to do next, about how they have to find out who’s paying Felix and Locus and how they’re going to get the information to the citizens of Chorus. The rest are off picking up abandoned blenders or whatever they can find in the ruins that litter Chorus, trying to help Simmons in whatever way they can. 

Simmons makes a weak sound, and Grif, sitting listlessly next to his lying form, the two of them connected by a red tube, makes the mistake of looking at him, like he’s been avoiding doing for a while now. 

He’s still too pale. He’s still covered in a significant amount of blood that’s now drying and starting to stink. Grey just slapped a bit of gauze over the new hole in his face (“So no little critters crawl in there and chew on the wires!”), and they haven’t put the prosthetics back on. The stumps too sensitive, the prosthetics still not entirely remade yet. 

If a single more inch of Simmons has to become metal because of Grif, he’s going to scream. 

Simmons is blinking his remaining eye open. Well, more like squinting blearily up into the sky, but still. 

“Hey,” Grif rasps. His throat hurts from screaming. Should he add that to his list of Very Serious Injuries? 

Simmons’ eye doesn’t properly clear, still retaining that sleepy slowness to it past the point it should’ve disappeared. Grif bites back a worried grimace. It’s just a concussion. It’s probably just a concussion. It’ll go away eventually. 

“... Grif?” he slurs. 

“Yup,” he simply says, instead of ragging him about who else it could possibly be. Guy got his head slammed into a wall like a basketball through a hoop. He’ll go easy on him until he can recite the first dozen numbers of pi again. 

There’s a long pause as Simmons fumbles with his train of thought. 

“Did I get him?” he finally asks hopefully. 

“Get--” He realizes it before he finishes the question. Did he get Felix, obviously. 

The long knife slash he got on his face from lunging at Felix had been a ridiculously low priority for Grey, but she’d tossed a bottle of peroxide and some bandaids at Grif before she stumbled off to collapse on top of a Freelancer, muttering about gangrene and infections. Grif had dully stared at them for a while before dutifully going through the still familiar motions, dimly remembering Kai and scraped knees. 

“You absolute dumbass,” he says. He’s supposed to be going easy on him here, but hey, at least his voice is weirdly soft. He tries to get it back to normal, but it’s just not cooperating. “Do you think you can bite through kevlar, all of a sudden? What was that supposed to accomplish, besides pissing him off? Why did you bite him?” 

Simmons blinks slowly at the onslaught of incredulous questions. Screws up his his face in concentration to answer. “Partners have each others backs.” 

Grif stares at him blankly for a long moment, feeling a little gutted. 

“You were the one who was in trouble, asshole,” he finally points out, his voice sounding even raspier than before. 

“I got him a little though, right…?” Simmons asks, voice sounding as unsteady as a dizzy drunk. And then his eye closes and he’s breathing the slow and steady breath of the deeply asleep. 

God, Grif wants to take a nap so much. He finally gives in to the exhaustion and lies down in the dirt next to Simmons, and closes his eyes. Hooks his pinkie finger around Simmons’ without letting himself think about it too much. 

“A little,” he grants, and falls asleep just as quickly. 

**Author's Note:**

> The illustration was done by the awesome [creatrixanimi!](http://creatrixanimi.tumblr.com/) Check her stuff out!


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